The first time I transformed a memory into sensual description, I fell in love with poetry. I finished the tight narrative arc with an epiphany—that concise rendering of a truth both simple and profound that surprised even me. In the poem, I handed the body of a slaughter animal to the woman of the house and felt resolution in the confines of a neatly lined page for an experience that had haunted me for years. It seemed finished, strained from my body and my mind, and so laden with detail that I was sure a reader might flinch at the touch of a pinky. I offered it to my workshop group a few days later. Here, I thought, now you, dear readers, can revel in the pain I’ve lived with my entire life.
Until this moment, bent over the page in my single bed at the start of my second year of college, I had not known what to do with my ugly past, but this, this was the shape of things to come. In the safety of my new life, hundreds of miles from the circumstances and people who had crippled me emotionally, I could image-out a usable story and truth. With the certainty of all teenagers, I believed wholly that an image could transform anything. Here was some darkness spun with wing and leg; it was as fine as a knife when I handled it in a poem.
Yet I had been living in the figurative since my eyes had first learned to focus. Floors cluttered with Dad’s wire-woven sculptures of larger-than-life disembodied man heads. I thought of them as brainy escapades with their circuitry exposed. The copper and brass wire spiraled, feeding mouths knotted closed, eyes flat with red jasper pupils. They were in a god voice that offered no words and gazed up distressingly at their creator, my father.
Gazing up to any windowsill, wall, or shelf I’d find the pouring notes of purples, blues, and greens in my mother’s abstract watercolors and acrylic paintings. I’d swim in her impressionistic vision where exaggerated light and shadow made the landscape moodier. She took liberties with colors, so I’d never seen such a blush or burnishing of emerald anywhere else.
In between reading the I Ching and Bhagavata, had my father secretly been studying the human nervous system? Did my mother need a pair of glasses? When I asked them the story behind these creations, they mentioned needing to make a buck. We needed to survive somehow because neither of my parents worked. They tended to their art.
Guitars leaning in a corner, artwork cluttering every room, they wrote songs and poetry, as well. Late at night, they worked out the chords to folksy ballads that I grew to hate after hearing them hundreds of times. We were often hungry; we were often in despair about where to live or how to pay for food and gas. Dad would get drunk, and his laughter would turn into rage which turned into sobbing tears. Both smoked pot upon waking, and throughout the day. Image: a joint stuck between his lips, Dad smiling at me as he bent a long length of copper wire into a spiral. Image: Mom tipping the ash off a joint at the kitchen sink. They were remaking the world as they saw it. Their middle-class straightlaced upbringings abandoned for art.
I grew up on art shows, flea markets, and street bazaars. In the 1970s, you could meet my parents at Venice Beach in Los Angeles, wire woven jewelry spread on a table, guitars out, a couple of bucks, and some coins started in the hat between their feet. “Dance,” Dad would yell at my siblings and me. “Dance,” which we did until we realized that no one else was dancing, crowds of beachgoers pushing past our pitiful ensemble.
Without knowing it, how I saw the world was being complicated by their artistic visions. The words that come to mind are dispersal, chaos, indecision. “Nothing keeps my eye still in there,” I wrote in “Eye of Water” as I tried to describe my mother’s paintings. In “Conversation with the Sculptor,” I described my father’s efforts as making bodies “out of knots.” And so often when I’ve written about my father, something is woven or wrapping itself in his presence.
When I finally started writing the poems that would make up my first book, I discovered that fractures, or fragments, both of memory and image, were enough to hold up the entirety of my sight. “I want to be the wrecker of this” I wrote in response to a memory of the early morning pristine mirror of Young Lakes in Yosemite, as I found myself wishing to “glide / toward a danger of no geography (“Water Answering Sky and Mountain”).” That I’ve found myself living all over the United States is perhaps a sign of how prophetic poetry can be at times. I was always going to be the kind of poet who “gets into puddles with the sky” because nothing had been in proportion to sense for most of my life (“Damaged Photos”).
For a long time, I felt bitter about how often we found ourselves hungry and destitute in broken-down vehicles on the side of the road when I was a child, but what a gift to have parents consumed by the need for something more than just survival. Somehow my parents always found us food and had a wide circle of friends who could send money in a pinch or collect us from the brink. Soon after I moved to North Carolina for my second tenure-track teaching position at a mid-size university, I started my own art business. Saturdays I get up around 4:15 AM to drive to an outdoor market a few towns away. After I have my art pieces hung and displayed, I prop my poetry books in the middle of the table, and it seems the story of my own artistic pursuit is complete, although still perplexing to me.
While I have not been destitute since I was a student, I was compelled to start the business so I could save money for a downpayment on my house. Last year, I built a studio in the backyard to extricate the clutter of ongoing projects that had taken over every surface and corner inside my house.
On a perfect day, I move between the page and my crafting table. I like to work with broken things, the strong remnants of what is left when something dies. Like driftwood which is the strongest part of a tree that has endured seasons of ocean and river currents to be worn into shapes that sometimes appear as animals. Or the sea glass I collected during my youth in Mendocino, California, a remnant representing our long history of dumping trash right into the sea and those forces finding the strongest core to mold into a gleaming gem. Abalone shell is perhaps my favorite material, which I also gather in Mendocino when I visit friends and family. My brother has been helpful in shipping what he can find once or twice a year, as well.
My passion for thrift stores has added to my arsenal of materials as I find antique and vintage dishware, single cups, and pitches long detached from their wedding sets, which I turn into planters and bird feeders. Sometimes I break cracked or damaged glass bowls and vases further to tumble the shards and make strikingly new sea glass-like pieces. The remnants of life, the evidence of a life before. These land on my craft table and become a new story as wind chimes, wall art, sun catchers, and jewelry even.
The natural composition of everything is to be part and parcel of something else. I didn’t have to work very hard to find this conversation within my artwork. I am always thinking about narrative and how to show a larger story through fragments of memory, as well as what washes up on shore. I find myself obsessed with line, the falling vertical curve, the climbing horizontal reach, the round meeting the sharp. When I suspend crystals and bells from a driftwood branch, wow, a piece that will speak to the sun and the wind, bringing nature a bit closer to the person who hangs this work in a window or on a porch. And don’t we all need to be a bit closer to nature these days?
Sometimes a customer will buy a copy of one of my books and one of my artistic creations, and I feel…yes! Yes, I can do it all, be a writer and an artist. That what has grown out of my work as a poet is this natural evolution—the arc, the narrative, which I think I can speak about succinctly in a few different forms. There is joy in a lifelong endeavor to heal and be healed through the forms that art offers.
Amber Flora Thomas is the author of Eye of Water, which won the Cave Canem Poetry Prize for a first book by an African American poet. Her other books are The Rabbits Could Sing, and most recently Red Channel in the Rupture. A recipient of numerous awards and prizes, her poetry has been published widely in journals and anthologies. A native of northern California, she currently lives on the Pamlico River in eastern North Carolina.